


Fealty

by thedevilchicken



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blindfolds, Loyalty, M/M, Porn with Feelings, Ritual Sex, Sex Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-21
Updated: 2018-11-21
Packaged: 2019-08-26 19:55:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16687903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: Stannis has been drained by the magic Melisandre has woven, but she knows a ritual that will transfer vital energy from one man to another. Davos reluctantly agrees to help.





	Fealty

**Author's Note:**

  * For [The_Plaid_Slytherin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Plaid_Slytherin/gifts).



Davos would like to say he isn't sure how this began, but the truth is that he knows. It began months ago with Melisandre, as all things have since she and her red god arrived on Dragonstone. 

"Why me?" he asked, with his cheeks lit up with flames like some fucking game of R'hllor's, when she told him what exactly it was that was being asked of him. She'd cornered him in the castle's library, where he was squinting as he tried to puzzle out the words in an old book that Pylos said was bound in dragon skin, which talked about the sea in such poetic terms he wondered if its writer had ever even sailed at all. Before he could protest, though he wasn't sure he had the proper words for that, she'd pulled up a second chair beside him and spelled out her demands in such blunt, bald terms he might have actually preferred the poetry. Perhaps it's true that Davos isn't exactly prudish, and he's seen just as many thing at sea as he has in port and then the other way around, but what Melisandre had said surprised him.

"Are you loyal to your king?" she asked, once the demand had been made, while she was sitting there far too close by for comfort. Davos supposed that was the point of it; if she kept him on edge like that, chances were he'd agree to her terms just to make her leave. Under any other circumstances that might have worked, but he found himself more irritated by it then than he was intimidated.

"Of course I am," he replied. "What kind of question is that?"

"I believe you." She stood and she strolled away from him, casually, gratingly blithely, tapping her fingernails against the edge of the heavy old table he'd been reading at. She turned back to him with a sudden sweep of long red robes against the flagstones. "But tell me, what would you do for him?"

"Whatever I'm able to," Davos said, simply.

"Anything he asked?"

"Within reason. A man only has so much to offer." 

"Would you take a life?"

"If I believed it was warranted."

"Would you give your own?"

He smiled wanly. "Some might say I have already."

"I believe he can trust you, Davos Seaworth. Is that belief the truth?"

"I'd like to think so." He raised his brows. "I'd like to think _he_ thinks so, too."

She leaned forward, leaned low, with her palms pressed against the worn old tabletop. She met his gaze steadily, intently, and perhaps a bit unnervingly. 

"I told him I would find someone he could trust to do this for him," she said. "And you already understand the power of the Lord of Light." She jutted up her chin, as if in a kind of challenge. "I can find him someone else instead, if you'd prefer?"

Davos sighed. He rubbed his face with both his hands as he sat back heavily in his high-backed, dragon-carved old chair. Because he understood what she'd said was true, he shook his head. He was, perhaps, one of the only men in all of Westeros - whether connected with Stannis Baratheon or not - who understood the situation as it had evolved about them. He understood its burning flames, and the terrible shadows that skulked beneath stone castle walls, taking the shape of the man to whose service he'd pledged himself. And he could not, for all his deference and understanding of his place within the fabric of the kingdoms, stomach leaving it to someone else to take his place. He couldn't bear the thought of the task that Melisandre had described falling to another man, though he despised the fact she must have known that. She knew a great many things she ought not to have known.

"How much will it take from me?" he asked her. 

"It will take as much as he needs it to," she replied, for once almost straightforwardly.

"I could die, then." 

"That's quite possible, yes. In the end." 

"Will he knows it's me?"

"He'll wear a blindfold. That is part of the ritual." 

"And we'll be alone? No observers? No chanting? Not even you?"

"Once the doors are closed, you'll be alone." She smiled at him sharply. "Except for the Lord of Light, who is everywhere." 

"He can't know who I am. Swear to me that you won't tell him." 

Melisandre stood up, tall and hard and serious. "You have my word," she said, and Davos, for once, was actually tempted to believe her. He studied her, her face, the way she stood, the look in her eyes, and where he expected to see contempt or fire or any of a dozen things, he saw a kind of avid hope. He supposed if nothing else, he believed her beliefs were sincere. He didn't have to believe them himself. 

He stood abruptly, his chair scraping loudly at the floor. "One hour, then," he said. "I'll be ready."

"I'll come for you myself," she replied.

He inclined his head, not quite a nod but a definite form of acknowledgement. She did the same and, with a kind of anxious unease he hadn't felt in years, if ever, Davos left the room. He walked away, having agreed to a thing he hadn't ever thought might be asked of him. 

\---

An hour later, true to her word, Melisandre pushed open the door to Davos's rooms. She found him waiting there, sitting elbows to knees with his head in his hands on the blanket box at the foot of his bed where he'd been since he'd left the library. 

He looked at her, jaw clenched and anxious, and she gestured for him to follow her; as he'd made up his mind for good or bad in that hour since he'd last seen her, he did exactly that. She led him up a long, winding staircase, down corridors he'd never seen before and hadn't known existed, and eventually she opened a pair of heavy double doors onto a room filled with warmth and light that spilled from tall bronze braziers cradling steady orange flames. And there was his king, supine on the bed at the centre of the chamber, where Davos had been assured he'd find him though he'd half expected to find nothing of the sort. He'd half expected some kind of trap, close to irrational as that was, but Stannis was lying there in front of him, blindfolded and naked. As he looked at him, Davos felt his face flush just as hot as Melisandre's fucking braziers likely were. 

He knew what he was there to do, because Melisandre had been thorough and explicit in her instructions. He knew how to do it, because all those wayward years sailing the Narrow Sea hadn't left him ignorant. He took off his mantle. He took off his tunic. He undressed himself quickly and quietly, though his heartbeat thudded hotly in his ears, as if the best thing to do under the circumstances would be to get it over with and see where the red woman's magic left him after. It was a simple thing he had to do, he thought, and it needn't take much time at all. But his eyes strayed back to his king as he lay there, not quite completely still, shifting now and then against the mattress, waiting intently. Waiting _for him_. Davos understood the sharp pang of desire he felt inside for what it was, because he knew it was far from the first time he'd thought about his king that way. 

The problem with it was that Stannis had trusted Melisandre to arrange this for him, and to arrange an appropriate partner for it. As Davos took off his worn old boots and stepped barefoot onto the chilly flagstone floor, he couldn't help but think those same thoughts he'd had before, when Stannis had named him Hand not so very long ago. It should have been some highborn lord, he thought right then as he looked at him, if it had to be a man at all. He'd trusted Pylos's counsel but Melisandre's was a different story; he recognised the hypocrisy of taking her at her word now over this when he could not have done so in good conscience at any other time before, just because he wanted to. 

Still, the fact was his king needed restoration. Melisandre said it must be a man, so he could spill his seed inside him and somehow give him back some of the vitality he'd lost to earlier shadowy endeavours. Davos looked at him, at the lines on his face and the grey in his hair, his broad shoulders, his long limbs, the length of his cock. Maybe what was being asked of him didn't take a highborn lord after all. Maybe all it took was Davos of Flea Bottom, who knew his place and knew his duty, and was willing to die if that was what it took. 

He knelt on the mattress at King Stannis's side, once he'd bared himself from head to toe, all his clothes discarded on a dragon-carved table by a shaded window. He reached out and he brushed the fingertips of his right hand against Stannis's warm, bare abdomen, over the trail of dark, coarse hair that led down lower still, unnerved but not particularly hesitant in spite of that. Stannis's own hands closed on handfuls of the plush red-gold blanket that was stretched out underneath him and with a typical flash of determination, he hitched up his knees, his feet pressed flat to the bed, and spread his thighs out wide. Davos's chest felt tight as he moved his hand and brushed the backs of his fingers over the flaccid length of Stannis's cock. It didn't remain that way for long, though; Davos watched it fill and rise and stiffen, then he wrapped his hand around it. He stroked him slowly, though with rhythm and with purpose. Stannis's breath was too loud over the crackle of the open flames for Davos to believe he was entirely unaffected by it. 

Then Stannis moved. He turned and he pulled himself up onto his knees while Davos watched and he leaned down low with his hands at the headboard and the blindfold still in place. Davos took the dish of oil that had apparently been laid out for this purpose, almost like some kind of offering and probably by Melisandre, and he slicked his fingers with it. As he spread Stannis's cheeks and teased his hole with the blunted tips of his shortened fingers, he just barely managed to marshal absurd laughter into a sharp, barking cough instead. It was ridiculous, he knew that. But that didn't mean he planned to stop.

He rubbed the oil onto his own erection, shame-faced and lightheaded with the thought of what he was about to do. He rubbed his own length between Stannis's cheeks, rocking his hips slowly, holding Stannis's cheeks in tight for just a little more friction. He trailed his shortened hand down over Stannis's bare skin, down his spine from the base of his neck to the indent by his tailbone, and he watched him arch his lower back. Davos swallowed. He bit his lip. He could have finished himself like that, just rubbing against him, but he knew the ritual demanded more; he pressed the tip of his cock to Stannis's hole, gritted his teeth and eased himself forward. He pushed against him, slowly, and felt the moment Stannis finally relaxed and the first inch of his erection pushed inside him. Stannis muffled a groan against his own forearm as Davos pushed in deeper and he felt a flare of heat in his cheeks, and in his chest, and in his hands and his heart and his cock, at the idea that maybe this was just a ritual, yes, and maybe Stannis had agreed to it just for the sake of the war, but it still sounded like he liked it. 

They moved together. Stannis pushed back against him, one hand braced against the headboard, and Davos closed his hands at Stannis's hips as he pushed into him in short, hard thrusts. His breath caught as Stannis wrapped one hand around his own erection, and he stroked himself, and Davos almost laughed out loud. Stannis came first, not two minutes later, and, when it was over, when Davos clenched his jaw to keep from cursing, when he bucked his hips and spilled inside him, he could feel Melisandre's magic draining him from deep inside like the cold of the sea. He steadied himself against Stannis's hips as he felt the braziers' heat all empty out of him. He steadied himself with his hands framing Stannis's waist and his cock still deep inside him. Except he was still unsteady as he pulled out and sat back and watched the room turn pale. 

Afterwards, he wasn't sure how he found the strength to dress himself, let alone leave the room. He did it, though, if only to ensure that Stannis would not have to know that it was him, and he dragged his feet, shoulders grazing walls, all the way back to his own rooms. 

He fell into bed fully clothed, and he slept like the dead until morning. He could only hope he'd done some good, and not just what he'd wanted to.

\---

The following day when Davos dragged himself up and washed and dressed and took himself off to the Stone Drum, the king seemed better if not quite his old self, and Davos was pleased by that if maybe also faintly embarrassed by how he'd reached so far above his station. He'd had men before, and been had by them, but sharing a bed with Stannis Baratheon was a different matter altogether. 

Stannis had so much renewed vitality to him, however, that three nights later Melisandre came for him again, and he went with her again because he'd seen for himself the good that it could do. He went again four nights after that, and Melisandre had to come into the room to help him dress once his function was complete, which he reluctantly permitted as he frankly had no other choice but crawling out naked on his hands and knees. There was a brief pause as they left Dragonstone for Storm's End and then Davos found himself guided to another room, arranged in just the same way as the first had been but in another castle, on another shore, there in Shipbreaker Bay. His head swam at the point of penetration, as if the process by which the life was draining out of him started earlier each time. He hadn't felt very much like himself since that first night. He understood what the red witch's power was doing to him, and to his king; as Davos weakened, Stannis rallied. Soon, he was stronger than he'd ever been, and Davos, paler and diminishing, was satisfied with that.

Two weeks later, following their return to Dragonstone with the surety that the bulk of Renly's former bannermen would follow their new king, Davos was led to Stannis's room for what he assumed would be the ninth and final time. He found he could bear it, having seen the vigor with which his king had argued with the stormlords and convinced them of their duty, seeing how he held himself tall and bore himself proudly and that so much of his former weariness had left him, as if R'hllor had infused him with new life like the people said and not like Davos had just given him his own. Stannis had never had his brothers' charm, but there was a new intensity to him that the men found stirring. If that was on account of Davos, he found that he could bear it very well. 

And then, twelve days ago now, Davos walked into the Chamber of the Painted Table and he stumbled, and he fell. He didn't have the strength to rise up from the floor again, not that that surprised him. What did come as a surprise, though, was that he didn't have to; his king lifted him up from the ground as if the weight of him was nothing. He lifted him just like a knight might lift a beautiful young princess who'd turned her ankle at a tourney, and not like a king might an aging old smuggler made lord. Not that he supposed the latter happened even as frequently than the infrequent former, but he couldn't think of a courtly tale that mentioned such a thing at all. 

People stared as they passed, but Stannis didn't pay them any mind and if Stannis didn't mind then Davos couldn't find it in him to mind much, either. He gripped weakly at the front of the king's tunic with his good hand and wondered, faintly, absently, where they were going to, until Stannis set him down on the bed they'd shared before. The space seemed different, though; instead of the light of wood burning in tall bronze braziers, it was lit by thin sunlight off the stormy grey sea through the unshaded windows. The difference that made was startling, or perhaps it was more the fact that Melisandre was not presently chanting her strange prayers to the Lord of Light on the king's behalf somewhere else within the citadel. For once, it truly was just the two of them.

Stannis sat down at Davos's side. "I have no interest in searching out a new Hand, Davos," he said, plainly. He paused a moment and then he set one large hand down at the centre of Davos's chest, warm even through the roughspun tunic he was wearing. "You've given enough. I need you alive." 

Davos winced. "She told you," he said.

"Melisandre?" Stannis shook his head. "No. She didn't say a word." 

"Then how...?"

Stannis raised his brows pointedly. "I have eyes in my head and I'm not a fool." Stannis spread his fingers and pressed down firmly. He looked down at his hand there against Davos's chest. "I agreed to the ritual on the condition that she find a man that I could trust. I make no secret of the fact I trust you. It could have been no one else." 

Davos looked at him as he lay there. Davos studied him. The expression on Stannis's face told the story of it: he had known from the start whose hands were on him, whose cock and come were in him, and had carried on with things outside that room as normal. Stannis had told Melisandre to find a man that he could trust, and he'd reasoned that it would _have_ to be him. That seemed to mean something, logically, or at least it did to Davos. He'd agreed to this, knowing that it _must_ be Davos Seaworth in his bed. 

"I understand," Davos said, and Stannis seemed to know exactly what he meant by that. His hand at Davos's chest moved up, fingers curled into his palm, to brush across Davos's jaw to the back of his neck. He leaned down, and Davos's pulse quickened as Stannis moved, still clothed, to cover Davos's body with his own. He rested their foreheads together, their eyes still open though too close to really see, breath a little too fast but Davos felt faint anyway. He lifted his hands and cupped Stannis's jaw with both his palms. He could feel Stannis starting to stiffen up against his thigh, and, in spite of everything, he felt himself respond in kind.

"Doesn't she need to be chanting, or whatever it is she does?" Davos asked. His throat felt tight. His voice sounded all wrong. 

Stannis pulled back, pushing up on both hands to look down at him. In the pale morning sunlight in place of the braziers, in his clothes, still in his boots, he seemed to look more real somehow. 

"I'm not doing this for R'hllor," Stannis said. And just a few minutes later, once Stannis had pulled their clothes just far enough out of the way, once Stannis had eased Davos over to one side and wrapped one arm around his waist there from behind, once Stannis had slicked himself and entered him, Davos knew beyond a doubt that that was true. Stannis laced his fingers with the shortened ones on Davos's left hand. It didn't feel much like R'hllor was in the room at all. 

\---

Tonight, they're sailing for King's Landing and the battle that awaits them there. 

In the king's cabin on the king's ship, a blindfold covers Davos's eyes, but he can feel the warmth of firelight cast from braziers onto his bare skin. It's almost as warm as Stannis's hands around his wrists. It's almost as warm as Stannis's mouth pressed to his throat, to his lips, to his jaw. If they're going to win a battle on the water, it's Davos that will need the energy; Stannis seems only too willing to give him his. One gives and one takes, but their roles don't always have to be the same. 

Melisandre is responsible for this. For once, when Stannis has him, Davos thinks that he might actually have cause to thank her.


End file.
